1
The Ganymede Hypothesis
Theodore Holden and Troy McLachlan
Cosmos in Collision, a new book co-authored by Theodore A. Holden and Troy D. McLachlan, involves a startling claim: that the
authors have pinpointed to within a statistical certainty the original home of modern humans on the largest of Jupiter’s moons,
Ganymede. Hominid to human evolutionary schemes are shown to be unworkable; humans are shown to be highly maladapted to
the conditions of this planet in very ancient times, implying that we could not plausibly have evolved or been created for this
planet; Ganymede is shown to be the remains of what would have been a perfect world for Elaine Morgan’s “Aquatic Ape” thesis
and for human habitation. By “to within a statistical certainty”, is meant that a zero probability event or probabilistic miracle would
have to have occurred for anything other than what the authors are proposing, to have happened.
1. Introduction
1.1 The Original Double Solar System.
Consider the axis tilts of planets in our system. If
our system had formed from a swirling disk of solar
material as textbooks claim, all axial tilts should be
approximately the same, that is, all near zero with
all axes of the planets roughly perpendicular to the
plane of orbit. The sun, Jupiter, and mercury do in
fact show that. Uranus and Venus are odd cases out
with their own explanations, but Neptune, Saturn,
Mars, and Earth all have axis tilts of 23.4 - 27
degrees.1
comprise what once was a separate system, which
must have been captured by our present sun as a
group.
The normal reaction is to assume that this occurred
hundreds of millions of years ago. Ancient literature
says it occurred a few thousand years ago. Primitive
people seeking to devise an astral religion today
would end up worshiping the sun and moon, but the
two chieftain gods of all antique religions were
Jupiter and Saturn. Plato consistently refers to
antediluvians as "Nurslings of Kronos(Saturn); the
main religious festival in ancient Rome was
"Saturnalia", our Sabbath is still called "Saturday".
Hesiod and Ovid claim there was a golden age hen
Saturn/Kronos was "King of Heaven", followed by
the great flood, then a brief "Silver Age" when
Jupiter/Zeus was "King of Heaven", followed by the
Trojan war and our present "Iron Age". In the same
language, our sun is the "King of Heaven" now.
1.2 Herbig-Haro objects and the way in which
the axis tilts of the Saturnian part of our
system came about.
The explanation which suggests itself is as follows:
Our sun, Jupiter, and Mercury, with their axes
roughly perpendicular to the plane of the system,
form one part of the ancient system; Uranus and
Venus are odd cases with their own separate
explanations; Neptune, Saturn, Mars, and Earth, with
their spin axes roughly 26° to the plane of the system,
Herbig-Haro objects are believed to be associated
with proto-stars in their infancy, and the accepted
view is that these baby stars are shooting out vast
polar jets of gas along their rotational axis in which
globules or beads of plasma collect in our now
familiar ‘string of pearls’ analogy. These so-called
beads maintain their axial alignment and rotation in
step with the proto-star exactly in the manner
suggested for the Earth/Saturn polar configuration.
Here, in fact, is the elusive evidence pointing to the
possibility that polar configurations are possible in
the depths of space.
2
relevant to our assertion that Earth started off under
Saturn according to this polar configuration model.
What mainstream scientists identify as polar jets of
hot gas are, in fact, Birkeland currents, the great
interstellar and interplanetary transmission lines for
the flow of electrical energy through interstellar
space. The beads of plasma collecting along these
Birkeland currents are where z-pinches are taking
place. Z-pinches are extremely stable areas into
which heavy elements like iron, ejected from the
proto-star or drifting in interstellar space, are
attracted and captured due to the intense magnetic
fields associated with z-pinches. Some of these zpinches fail to spark into full-blown main-sequence
stars, and instead produce brown dwarfs, They even
may produce the solid cores needed for the formation
of terrestrial-type planets — and all this is happening
along the same axial alignment of their proto-star’s
shared rotation.
The so-called ‘bow-wave shocks’ supposedly
produced by the hot gas shooting out along the protostar’s polar axis are nothing more than what plasma
physics calls a ‘Double Layer’. These double layers,
or DLs, are the signature effect of a Langmuir sheath,
or, in other words, a plasma sheath; the same protective
electrical cocoon we have already encountered when
looking at the electrical environment surrounding
brown dwarf stars. Their presence in Herbig-Haro
objects is a dead giveaway that serious electrical
activity is taking place, the kind of activity that
produces intensely strong and attractive magnetic
fields. Wherever you have powerful magnetic fields
you have a recipe for potential planet and starbirthing activity; it is the magnetism at work that
attracts heavy elements like iron to form a solid core.
It is this profusion of electrical activity that is most
The lifespan of a Herbig-Haro object is relatively
short, lasting in the tens of thousands of years.2
Things happen quickly where these objects are
concerned, and they apparently begin to break up
once the proto-star at its center develops into a fullyfledged main-sequence star like our current sun. Any
brown dwarfs and their satellites attached to such a
former proto-star will be released to form their own
planetary nebula while finding their own way in
space.
A brown dwarf star formed in this environment can
be expected to maintain its own axially aligned
Birkeland current even if it is severed from the main
Birkeland current emanating from the main protostar. Acting as a spinning homo-polar electric motor,
or Faraday motor, the new brown dwarf star will
generate its own electrical equilibrium as it feeds
from the same general galactic electrical circuit that is
also driving the main proto-star at the heart of the
now breaking-apart Herbig-Haro object. In this way
its axial tilt may change slightly, an important
consideration when contemplating why Saturn came
to have a different axial tilt to the Sun.
3
2. Dark and bright sides of the ancient
system.
2.1 Saturn, Mars, and Earth (How dark was it?)
Any close proximity proto-planets captured along the
Birkeland current of this newly formed and now
separated brown dwarf star, either through ejection
from a parent body or through the magnetic
attraction of heavy elements into a z-pinch, can also
be expected to remain trapped in the z-pinch in which
they find themselves. Z-pinches are very stable
electrical constructs and are capable of holding a
planetary body in rotational lock-step alignment with
the polarity of the brown dwarf’s Birkeland current.3
The basic idea then, is that our system began life as a
Birkeland current and Herbig Haro object; the Sun
then captured the northern components, particularly
Jupiter, which retained its own axial alignment; the
southern part of the system, also retaining its own
axial alignment, began a slow spiral into the sun’s
neighborhood, finally approaching the Sun’s plane of
orbit in line at a ~26° angle. This ultimately resulted
in the present ~26° angles of rotation of the former
components of the Saturnian system. Uranus may
have acquired its odd axis tilt from battering as the
lead body when the Saturnian system moved into the
present solar system.
Venus is another special case. Bob Bass noted that
Venus’ retrograde spin cannot plausibly be
primordial and must have arisen via entanglement
with some other cosmic body; and that the curious
phase lock in which Venus shows observers on Earth
the same face at inferior conjunctions, implies that
other body has to have been Earth.
Rocky planets orbiting a sub Brown dwarf star would
orbit inside the plasma sheath or Heliosphere of the
small star. Radiant energy would not be in short
supply, but light would be and would be canted
towards the blue and red extremes of the visible
spectrum. At a later point in time, the earth acquired
dust-laden auroral bands which blocked out almost
all light from North temporal latitudes. Dwardu
Cardona and other authors have described the
curious lack of an ice age in the arctic.4 At least some
parts of the Earth went from being very dark places to
being very, very dark places.
2.2 The Sun and Jupiter in ancient times.
When the discovery of exoplanets was first
confirmed,5 it was natural that there would be a
sampling bias towards finding large, gas-like giants
since their enormous physical size made them easier
to detect than smaller sized terrestrial-type planets
like Earth. What was not anticipated, however, was
4
that these huge gas giants, some many times the mass
of Jupiter, would be found circling in extremely close
orbits around their host stars. This fact is completely
at odds with the accepted SNDM notion of planetary
formation. The gravitational-based nebular model for
the formation of a solar system calls for gas-giant
planets to inhabit the system’s outer edges, while
smaller terrestrial planets are expected to take up the
innermost orbits. When Jupiter-sized planets, or ‘hot
Jupiters as they were subsequently called, started
appearing where Earth-like planets should be,
journalists covering mainstream science started
talking about going back to the drawing board:
animals.
The eyes are the first thing a viewer notices with
Danny Vendramini’s Neanderthal reconstructions:
“As astronomers discovered the first extrasolar planets, it quickly became obvious that
the formation theories that we’d built on our
own Solar System were only part of the
story. They didn’t predict the vast number of
hot Jupiters astronomers found nearly
everywhere. Astronomers went back to the
drawing board to put more details into the
theory, . . .”6 (Emphasis ours)
With gas-giant exoplanets now regularly discovered
within 1 – 2 AU of their host stars, we now have
growing data pointing to the common existence of
gas-giants within the habitable zone of far-off distant
sun-like stars - gas-giants not unlike our own Jupiter.
It would not then be untoward to suggest that, given
the then absence of the other major planets seen
today, the Sun’s sole and original gas-giant, namely
Jupiter, would most likely have been found in a much
closer orbit to the one it currently holds, as seems to
be the norm elsewhere. If such an orbit were within 1
– 2 AU of the Sun (where Earth is now), then it is
reasonable to also suggest that Jupiter’s three
currently ice covered moons, Europa, Ganymede, and
Callisto, would have enjoyed liquid water
environments spectacularly conducive to the
existence of aquatic-based life had they also borne
substantive atmospheres.
Image courtesy www.themandus.org
Rob Gargett (the “Subversive Archaeologist ”) notes
that if you draw a humanized Neanderthal with the
eyes and nose as large as the bones indicate they
would have to be, what you end up with is still
outlandish:8
2.3 Creatures of the Saturnian (dark) system.
Most if not all of the creatures of the Saturnian
system, particularly dinosaurs7 and hominids, had
larger eyes then we normally see in today’s land
Image courtesy of Rob Gargett, The Subversive
Archaeologist Blogspot
5
The Neanderthal, in fact, had a larger brain than
modern humans do but was not inventive like
modern humans. Given a creature with a larger brain
than ours and tens of thousands of years to work
with, one might expect to find Neanderthal cities; of
course there aren’t any. New studies are indicating
that:
“...Results imply that larger areas of the
Neanderthal brain, compared to the modern
human brain, were given over to vision and
movement and this left less room for the higher
level thinking required to form large social
groups....”9
In other words, the Neanderthal brain was dominated
by what you might call the neurological equivalent of
the circuitry for a military night-vision scope.
our own ancestors and Neanderthals.11 Such claims
have to be able to pass simple sniff tests for logic to be
believable, and these claims don't; Cosmos in
Collision goes into these questions in some detail.
2.6 What do humans need from an
environment?
An original home world for humans would have to
have been bright. Darkness mainly induces humans
to sleep and human eyes would have been all but
worthless in the conditions of the Saturnian system.
Such an original world would also have needed to be
wet. Elaine Morgan catalogued a fairly long list of
features which humans share with the aquatic
mammals:12

2.4 Creatures of the Sun/Jupiter (bright)
system.
Such were the adaptations of creatures of the
Saturnian system

Humans and Dolphins have the smallest relative eye
sizes of higher creatures; both would be very bad
candidates for having either evolved or been created
for the Saturnian system.10
2.5 The Human/Hominid non relation
Humans would have been maladapted to Earth’s
ancient conditions in at least three ways, and these
three problems would have been severe enough to
rule out any sort of hominid to human evolutionary
schemes. In other words, a hominid wishing to
evolve into a human would need to have:



Lost his fur coat while an ice age was going
on.
Lost 99% of his sense of smell while trying to
make it as a prey animal on land.
Lost almost all of his night vision at a time
when night was the only time of day to be
had.
We read (Paabo and Max Planck) that some (not all)
modern human groups share Neanderthal genes and
that this implies some level of interbreeding between


The most obvious visual difference between
us and primates is the fact of our legs being
our major limbs; that is basically an
adaptation for swimming and wading.
Voluntary control of our breathing is an
example. That is basically an adaptation for
swimming; we take it for granted but
monkeys and apes don't have it, and that is
the only reason that chimpanzees and
gorillas cannot be taught to speak English;
they can be taught to communicate using
deaf signs fairly easily.
Face to face sex is a behavioral characteristic
of aquatic mammals. If any land animals
other than humans do this, it’s very rare.
Likewise sweating and the way in which
humans use fat are maladaptive for a land
animal but reasonable for an aquatic
mammal.
There are numerous other such examples, i.e. the list
is a fairly long one. Humans still show a preference
for living around water. . Most of our major cities
now stand on the shore of some body of water and
‘going to the beach’ is a worldwide trait amongst
humans vacationing. Yet another measure of the
extent to which humans still prefer living near water
today can be had from the fact that something like
80% of the targets that the US military might ever
want to engage were said to have been within the 25
mile range of the guns of the Iowa class battleships,
that is, within 25 miles of some shoreline.
6
Elaine Morgan’s thesis has never gained any traction
in academia and there are two main reasons.13 One is
that no fossil evidence of any sort of an aquatic ape
has ever been found. The other (and more serious)
problem is that there has never been a body of water
on this planet which would be safe for humans to live
in.
An original home world for humans would need to
have been bright; it would need to have been wet; and
its waters would need to have been safe. A 10 minute
tour of the ancient sea monster exhibit hall of the
Smithsonian Museum should convince anybody that
the prehistoric oceans of this planet would not
qualify.
3. Ganymede.
3.1 Jupiter’s antique environment and
location (large, close-in exoplanets).
Ancient Jupiter is elevated to the sub-stellar status
of having once been a T-class sub-brown dwarf,
enjoying a much tighter orbit around the sun
within the latter’s so-called ‘habitable zone’. This
revised orbital relationship is arrived at after
assessing recent exoplanet data that shows
growing numbers of Jupiter-like planets and
suspected brown dwarfs in similar orbits around
other sun-like stars. The data, we suggest, points
to close orbiting Jupiter-like planets being the
norm throughout the universe; this fact supports
our hypothesis while contradicting currently
accepted notions for gas-giant planet formation
according to the accretion dictates of the Solar
Nebular Disk Model (SNDM). Ganymede would
have been warmed by both Jupiter and our Sun.
3.2 Brown dwarf stars and water.
Jupiter’s reclassification as a former T-class subbrown dwarf also provides a solution as to where all
the water currently locked up as ice on the Galilean
moons came from. Brown dwarf stars are known
carriers of water and the misting and shedding of this
water within a brown dwarf’s plasma sphere can be
expected to settle on any rocky satellites orbiting
within. It is precisely this scenario that we suggest
for the origins of the vast amounts of water ice found
on the Jovian satellites.
3.3 Fresh water oceans.
Ganymede seems to be remarkably deficient in the
14
element Sodium; i.e., salt. Sodium is thirteen times
less abundant around Ganymede than it is around the
other Jovian moon Europa. Io, Jupiter’s highly
volcanic moon, is awash in sodium. However,
Ganymede is not, and whatever small amounts of
sodium have been detected on its surface is thought
to have somehow found its way there from
15
Ganymede’s supposedly deep salty ocean. Cosmos
in Collision proposes nonstandard explanations for
Ganymede’s conductivity, magnetosphere, and low
moment of inertia.
3.4 Ganymede’s moment of inertia: water or
pumice?
Ganymede’s ultra low moment of inertia is normally
assumed to indicate a fantastically deep ocean,
basically an outer mantel composed of salt water
which supposedly accounts for both the low moment
of inertia and the conductivity required for the
magnetosphere. Cosmos in Collision postulates an
outer mantel of pumice to explain the moment of
inertia and p-holes to explain the conductivity.
3.5 Pumice bergs and islands.
A fresh water ocean lies over top of the pumice outer
mantel. Pumice actually can float. In the age when
Ganymede was inhabited, there were floating burgs
of pumice as well as anchored islands of pumice.
Vegetation grew easily and well on these burgs and
islands. Cosmos in Collision proposes that the Rocky
lumps found in the present ice of Ganymede are
remnants of these pumice burgs and islands.
7
3.6 Radiation: Ganymede’s magnetosphere.
As mentioned above, Cosmos in Collision proposes a
nonstandard explanation for Ganymede’s
magnetosphere. It is worth noting that Ganymede
alone amongst Jupiter’s Galilean moons has a
magnetosphere. Of Jupiter’s Galilean moons: Io and
Europa are inside Jupiter’s radiation belt; Callisto,
outside of Jupiter’s radiation belt, would still
experience radiation from the sun and shows no sign
of ever having had an oxygen atmosphere;
Ganymede, with its intrinsic magnetosphere, is safe
from all radiation, shows signs of a past oxygen
atmosphere, and in past ages would have amounted
to a fresh water ocean paradise.
changed more than it had during the
previous million years. This
efflorescence of technological and
artistic creativity signifies the
emergence of the first culture that
observers today would recognise as
distinctly human, marked as it was by
unceasing invention and variety.
During that brief period of 5,000 or so
years, the stone tool kit, unchanged in
its essential form for ages, suddenly
began to differentiate wildly from
century to century and from region to
region. Why it happened and why it
happened when it did constitute two of
the greatest outstanding problems in
paleoanthropology.”
4.2 The spiral approach of the Saturnian
System
4. Capture of the Saturnian system and
transfer
4.1 The sudden appearance of Cro Magnon
man.
One thing scholars all agree on is that whatever
caused Cro Magnon people to appear on this planet
when they did was not gradual. Vendramini ("Them
and Us") notes:16
“The speed of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution
in the Levant was also breathtaking.
Anthropologists Ofer Bar-Yosef and Bernard
Vandermeersch:
“Between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago
the material culture of western Eurasia
The Saturnian system did not approach our Sun in a
straight line; it was a spiral approach and it was only
at the points of near intersection the transfer of living
creatures would have been possible. The multithousand year time lapse between the Cro-Magnon
saltation and Genesis is thus explained as the time
between two such near approaches.
4.3 Cro Magnons and Bible Antediluvians
There appear to be two original basic human groups
on our planet, i.e. Cro Magnons and Bible
antediluvians. The two were all but genetically
identical but the original cultures and technologies
were completely different due to the time lapse. Both
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groups appear to be capable of producing any color
or feature found amongst modern humans, i.e. the
difference was/is not about color or race. CroMagnons thus account for the “Pre-Adamites” who
Cain worries about in Genesis 4, and whose existence
answers other biblical conundrums.
There is no way to believe that Adam, Eve, or any of
the people in Genesis were descended from CroMagnonss. There is a list of things which the Bible
and Jewish literature would have to know about were
that the case. Aside from everything else, the people
of Genesis were metal technology people from day
one, i.e. that was never any kind of a Stone Age
amongst them. Cosmos in Collision goes into these
questions in some detail.
4.4 Occam’s Razor and other possibilities.
In the absence of time machines, Cosmos in Collision
makes heavy use of the logical principle called
"Occam's razor.” Named after Friar William of
Occam, the principle is generally understood to mean
that of competing theories with equal explanatory
power, the simplest should be preferred. In
particular, given the immense distances between stars
in our galaxy, in the presence of a completely
plausible origin for modern man within our own solar
system, theories involving saltations from other star
systems are ruled out. Likewise the possibility of
humans arising on something entirely like
Ganymede, which has since been destroyed leaving
no trace, is ruled out. In other words, for the
Ganymede hypothesis to be wrong, one of two flavors
of a probabilistic miracle or zero probability event
would have to have occurred. That is, human
saltation from interstellar space, or from a missing
twin of Ganymede.
9
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbig–
Haro_object, “HH objects are transient
phenomena, lasting not more than a few
thousand years.”
3http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2011/12/0
6/essential-guide-to-the-eu-chapter-6/,
“Another significant factor emerges from the
mathematical analysis. The force-free or fieldaligned arrangement is a minimum energy state
for the current to flow in. This means that the
field-aligned arrangement is inherently stable.
Unless disturbed by external factors, currents
will tend to remain aligned with the magnetic
field.”
4 Dwardu Cardona, “Flare Star,” Traffid
Publishing, Victoria, B.C., Canada, 2007, page
81; quoting R. F. Griggs, “Indications as to
Climate Change From the Timberline of Mount
Washington,” Science, Vol. 95, No. 2473 (1942),
p. 519
55
Canadian astronomers Bruce Campbell, G. A. H.
Walker, and Stephenson Yang announced in 1988 the
first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting the star
Gamma Cephei. This was subsequently fully
confirmed in 2003. The 1992 discovery of two
planets circling the pulsar PSR 1257+12 is generally
recognized as the first fully confirmed discovery of
an extra-solar planetary system.
6 Jon Voisey, Rocky, Low-Mass Planet Discovered by
Microlensing, June 17, 2011, Universe Today.com;
http://www.universetoday.com/86841/rocky-lowmass-planet-discovered-by-microlensing/
7 http://news.discovery.com/animals/nocturnaldinosaurs-night-fossil-110414.html
8http://www.thesubversivearchaeologist.com/
2011/11/face-it-neanderthals-were-top.html
9 BBC: “Neanderthals' large eyes 'caused their
demise'”
1
2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scienceenvironment-21759233
http://www.wonderquest.com/EyeBigge
st.htm (Ryosuke Motani ):
10
11http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_g
enome_project, “In May 2010, the project
released a draft of their report on the sequenced
Neanderthal genome. Contradicting the results
discovered while examining mitochondrial
DNA, they demonstrated a range of genetic
contribution to non-African modern humans
ranging from 1% to 4%. From their Homo
sapiens samples in Eurasia (French, Han
Chinese & Papuan) the authors state that it is
likely that interbreeding occurred in the Levant
before Homo sapiens migrated into Europe”
12 http://www.primitivism.com/aquaticape.htm
13http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/pseudo
science/aquatic_ape_theory.html
14 By ‘salt’ we refer to sodium in its various
manifestations as what is called ‘rock salt’ and
not to sodium chloride. Sodium is an alkali
metal found in various minerals such as rock
salt and is the sixth most abundant element in
the Earth’s crust. A lack of sodium in
Ganymede’s atmosphere is blamed on its
magnetosphere which may be fending off
energetic particles capable of creating the
chemical transformations to produce sodium.
Or it may simply be that Ganymede lacks
sodium per sé.
15 See; Michael E. Brown, “A Search for a Sodium
Atmosphere around Ganymede,” Icarus, Volume 126,
Issue 1, March 1997, Pages 236-238.
16
Danny Vendramini “Them and Us”, Kardoorair
Press (2009), PDF electronic edition, pages 22 – 23